Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter collection 11-15

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  He closed the manila envelope and handed it to me. “To solve a crime.”

  “Solving these crimes would add to your unit’s clout. Last time we spoke you needed that clout.”

  He was looking at me carefully.

  “Are you here officially, Bradley?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared into his bland face. “Are you here officially just as an FBI agent?”

  “Don’t know what you mean.”

  “You told me once that I’d come to the attention of some of the less savory branches of our government, the spooks, I think you called them. Is Van Anders a spook?”

  “No government in their right mind would want an animal like this in their country.”

  “Talk to me, Bradley, talk to me, or the next time we meet I’m not going to trust you like I do right this minute.”

  He sighed and suddenly looked tired. He rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “These murders were brought to our attention. But I’d seen crimes like this before. In a different country, in a place where the government was more worried about staying in power than protecting helpless women.” There was a look in his eyes, something faraway, and pain-filled.

  “You said you got out of that line of work.”

  “I did.” He looked very steadily at me, no cop eyes now. “Men like Van Anders were one of the reasons I couldn’t keep doing it. But when certain people found out that Van Anders might actually have been let loose within the confines of the United States, they weren’t happy. I have a one time permission to help things along here.”

  “What’s the price tag on this help?”

  “Heinrick will be escorted out of the country. They’ll never put a name to the second man he was taken in with. It will all disappear.”

  “Heinrick is a suspected terrorist. You think that they’ll just let him walk?”

  “He’s wanted in five different countries that we have strong treaties with. Who do we give him to, Anita? Better to just let him go.”

  “Don’t you want to know why he was in town? I know I want to know why he was following me.”

  “I told you why these kind of people would want you.”

  “So I can raise the dead for them. A political leader here, a few zombie bodyguards there,” I tried to make a joke of it, but Bradley wasn’t laughing.

  “You know the man you found nailed to his living room wall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He knew Heinrick and Van Anders, and he felt that they were too extreme. He left and he hid, but not well enough.”

  “If it was an execution, why make it look like some sort of ritual murder?”

  “So it wouldn’t look like an execution.”

  “Why did they care?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It was a message, Anita. They wanted him dead, and they wanted him dead in such a way that it would be sensational enough to make headlines. They wanted his death out there for all the others like him, like me, that left.”

  “You don’t know this for sure, Bradley.”

  “Not all of it, but I know that everyone involved wants Van Anders caught, and Heinrick gone.”

  “What about the others?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are they gone for good, or should I still be worried?”

  “Be worried, Anita, I would be.”

  “Great.” Something occurred to me. “I know this is all off the record for you. Well, I’ve got one thing off the record to ask you.”

  “I can’t promise, but what is it?”

  I gave him Leo Harlan’s name, and a general description, because it’s not that hard to change your name. “He says he’s an assassin, and I believe him. He says he’s here on a sort of vacation, and I believe that, too. But St. Louis is suddenly lousy with internationally wanted bad guys, and I’d be curious to know if my client is tied to them somehow.”

  “I’ll check around.”

  “If he comes up on any of your hit parades, I’ll avoid him, and refuse to raise his ancestor. If he doesn’t, I’ll do the job.”

  “Even though he’s an assassin?”

  I shrugged. “Who am I to throw stones, Bradley? I try not to judge people more than I have to.”

  “Or maybe you’re getting more comfortable with murderers.”

  “Yeah, all my friends are either criminals, monsters, or cops.”

  That made him smile.

  Zerbrowski yelled from downstairs. “Anita, yo, we’re out of here.”

  I gave Bradley my cell phone number. He copied it down. I ran for the stairs.

  56

  O’BRIEN HAD STARTED the interrogation before we got there. People in St. Louis didn’t seem to understand that sirens and lights on a police car meant get the fuck out of the way. It was almost as if the police car with all flags flying made a gawkers’ block around us. The drivers were so busy trying to figure out why we were in such a rush that they forgot to get out of the way.

  I had never seen Zerbrowski so angry. Hell, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him angry. Not for real. He’d raised enough of a fuss to drag O’Brien out of the interrogation, but she kept saying, “You can have him when we’re through with him, Sergeant.”

  Zerbrowski’s voice had crawled down so low it was almost painful to listen to it. That dragging, careful voice held enough heat to make me nervous. O’Brien didn’t seem impressed.

  “Don’t you think, detective, that questioning him about a serial killer that’s already butchered three, maybe four people, takes precedent over questioning him about following a federal marshal?”

  “I am questioning him about the serial killer.” A small frown formed between her eyes. “What do you mean three, maybe four?”

  “We haven’t finished counting the pieces at the last crime scene. There may be two victims.”

  “You can’t tell?” she asked.

  He let out his breath in a loud humph of air. “You don’t know anything about these crimes. You don’t know enough to be questioning him without us.” His voice shook with the effort not to start screaming at her.

  “Maybe you can sit in, sergeant, but not her.” She jerked a thumb in my direction.

  “Actually, detective, technically, you can’t exclude me from the interrogation now that Heinrick is a suspect in preternatural crimes.”

  O’Brien looked at me, a blank, unfriendly stare. “I excluded you just fine before, Blake.”

  “Ah,” I said, and felt myself smiling, I couldn’t help it. “But that was when Heinrick was a suspected terrorist, and guilty of nothing more than illegal weapons violations, very mundane stuff. And nothing that my federal marshal status puts under my jurisdiction. As you pointed out earlier I’m not a regular federal marshal. My jurisdiction is very narrow. I have no legal status on nonpreternatural crimes, but on preternatural crimes I have jurisdiction all across this country. I don’t have to wait to be invited in.” I know I looked smug when I finished, but I just couldn’t seem to help myself. O’Brien was being pissy, and pissiness should be punished.

  O’Brien looked like she’d bitten into something bitter. “This is my case.”

  “Actually, O’Brien, it’s everybody’s case now. Mine, because federal law gives me the jurisdiction. Zerbrowski, because it’s a preternatural case, and that means it belongs to the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team. Truthfully, you have no jurisdiction on the murders. They didn’t happen on your turf, and you wouldn’t even have known that Heinrick was involved if we hadn’t shared information so freely with you.”

  “We played fair with you,” Zerbrowski said, “play fair with us, and we all win.” His voice was almost normal. He’d lost that frightening bass.

  She pointed a finger at me, rather dramatically, I thought. “But it’ll be her name in the paper.”

  I shook my head. “Jesus, O’Brien, is that all this is about? You want your name in the headlines?”

  “I know that cracking a serial murder could make me a serg
eant.”

  “If you want your name on this case, fine,” I said, “but let’s worry more about solving the case than who’s going to get credit for it.”

  “Easy enough for you to say, Blake. Like you said, you don’t have a career in law enforcement. Getting credit for this won’t help you, but you’ll still get the credit.”

  Zerbrowski pushed away from the wall where he’d been leaning. He touched the files on the edge of the table. He opened one just enough to pull out a photo. He half-slid, half-threw the picture across the table at O’Brien.

  It was a splash of shape and color. Most of the color was red. I didn’t look too hard at it. I’d seen the real deal, I didn’t need a reminder.

  O’Brien glanced down at the picture, then looked again. She frowned, and almost reached out for the photo, then stared harder. She concentrated on the image. I watched her try to make sense of what she was seeing, watched her mind rebel at making sense of it. I saw the moment she saw it, on her face, in the sudden paleness of her skin. She sat down slowly in the chair on her side of the table.

  She seemed to have trouble looking away from the picture. “Are they all like this?” she asked in a voice gone thin.

  “Yes,” Zerbrowski said. His voice was soft, too, as if he had made his point and wouldn’t rub it in.

  She looked up at me, and it looked like a physical effort to pull her gaze away from that photo. “You’ll be the darling of the media again,” but her voice was soft, like it didn’t matter.

  “Probably,” I said, “but it’s not because I want to be.”

  “You’re just so damned photogenic,” her voice had held a hint of her earlier scorn, then she frowned and glanced down at the photo again. She seemed to hear what she’d just said, and with that awful, hideous photo sitting in front of her, it seemed the wrong thing to say.

  “I didn’t mean . . .” She rallied, and put back on her angry face, but it seemed more like a mask to hide behind now.

  “Don’t worry, O’Brien,” Zerbrowski said, and he had his teasing voice back. I knew enough to dread what would come out of his mouth next, but she didn’t. “We know what you meant. Anita is just so damned cute.”

  She gave a weak smile. “Something like that, yes,” she said. The smile vanished as if it had never existed. She was all business again. O’Brien never seemed to get very far from business. “Seeing that this doesn’t happen to another woman is more important than who gets credit.”

  “Glad to hear we all agree,” Zerbrowski said.

  O’Brien stood up. She pushed the picture back towards Zerbrowski, doing her best not to look at it this time. “You can question Heinrick, and the other one, though he doesn’t say much.”

  “Let’s have a plan before we go in there,” I said.

  They both looked at me.

  “We know that Van Anders is our guy, but we don’t know for sure that he’s our only guy.”

  “You think one of the men we have here helped Van Anders do this?” O’Brien motioned towards the piture that Zerbrowski was tucking away.

  “I don’t know.” I glanced at Zerbrowski and wondered if he was thinking the same thing I was. The first message had read “we nailed this one, too.” We. I wanted to make sure that Heinrick wasn’t part of that ‘we’. If he was, then he wasn’t going anywhere, not if I could help it. I really didn’t care who got credit for solving the case. I just wanted it solved. I just wanted to never, ever have to see anything else as bad as that bathroom, that bathtub, and its . . . contents. I use to think I helped the police out of a sense of justice, a desire to protect the innocent, maybe even a hero complex, but, lately, I’m beginning to understand that sometimes I want to solve the case for a much more selfish reason. So I don’t ever have to walk through another crime scene as bad as the one I just saw.

  57

  HEINRICK WAS SITTING behind the small table, slumped back in the chair, which is actually harder than it looks in a straight-backed chair. His carefully cut blond hair was still neat, but he’d laid his glasses on the table, and his face looked younger without them. His file said he was closer to forty than thirty, but he didn’t look it. He had an innocent face, and I knew that was a lie. Anyone who looks that innocent after thirty is either lying, or touched by the hand of God. Somehow I didn’t think Leopold Heinrick was ever going to be a saint. Which left only one conclusion—he was lying. Lying about what? Now there was the question.

  There was a Styrofoam cup with coffee in front of him. It had been sitting long enough that the cream had started to separate from the darker liquid, so that swirls of paleness decorated the top of the coffee.

  He looked up when Zerbrowski and I entered. Something flickered through his pale eyes: interest, curiosity, worry? The look was gone before I could decipher it. He picked up his glasses, giving me a blank, innocent face. With his glasses back on, he came closer to looking his age. They broke up the line of his face, so that the frames were what you saw first.

  “You want a fresh cup of coffee?” I asked him as I sat down. Zerbrowski leaned against the wall, near the door. We’d start out with me questioning Heinrick to see if I got anywhere. Zerbrowski made it clear that I was up to bat, but no one, including me, wanted me alone with Heinrick. He had been following me, and we still didn’t know why. Agent Bradford had guessed that it was part of some plot to get me to raise the dead for some nefarious purpose. Bradford didn’t know, not for sure. Until we knew for sure, caution was better. Hell, caution was probably always better.

  “No,” Heinrick said, “no more coffee.”

  I had a fresh cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of file folders in the other. I placed the coffee on the table and made a show of arranging the pile of folders neatly beside it. His gaze flicked to the folders, then settled serenely back on me.

  “Had too much coffee?” I asked.

  “No.” His face was attentive, blank, with a touch of wariness. Something had him worried. Was it the files? Too large a stack. We’d intended it to be too large. There were files at the bottom that had nothing to do with Leopold Heinrick, Van Anders, or the nameless man that was sitting in another room just down the hall. It was impossible to have a military record with no name attached, but somehow the dark-haired American had managed it. His file was so full of blacked-out spaces that it was almost illegible. The fact that no one would give our John Doe a name, but they would acknowledge he was once a member of the armed forces was disturbing. It made me wonder what my goverment was up to.

  “Would you like something else to drink?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “We may be in here a while.”

  “Talking is thirsty work,” Zerbrowski said from the back.

  Heinrick’s eyes flicked to him, then back to me. “Silence is not thirsty work.” His lips quirked, and it was almost a smile.

  “If sometime during this interview you want to tell us exactly why you were following me, I’d love to hear it, but that’s really secondary to why we’re here.”

  He looked puzzled then. “When you first stopped us that seemed to be very important to you.”

  “It was, and I’d still like to know, but the priorities have changed.”

  He frowned at me. “You are playing games, Ms. Blake. I am tired of games.”

  There was no fear in him. He seemed tired, wary, and not happy, but he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid of the police, or me, or going to jail. There was none of that anxiety that most people have in a police interrogation. It was odd. Bradley had said that our goverment was going to just let Heinrick go. Did he suspect that—know that? If so, how? How did he know? Why wasn’t he the least bit afraid of spending time in the St. Louis jail system?

  I opened the first file. It held grainy copies of old crimes. Women Van Anders had slaughtered in foreign countries, far from here.

  I laid the photos out in front of him, in a neat row of black and white carange. In some of the photos the quailtiy was so bad that if you hadn�
�t known you were looking at human remains, you’d have never guessed. Van Anders had reduced his victims to Rorschach tests.

  Heinrick looked bored now, almost disgusted. “Your Detective O’Brien has already shown me these. Already marched out her lies.”

  “What lies would those be?” I asked. I sipped my coffee, and it wasn’t bad. It was fresh, at least. As I sipped, I watched his face.

  He folded his arms across his chest. “That there are fresh murders here in your city like these old ones.”

  “What makes you think she’s lying?”

  He started to say something, then closed his mouth tight, his lips a thin angry line. He just glared at me, pale eyes bright with anger.

  I opened the second folder and began laying out colored photos just above the old black and whites. I laid them out in a line of bright death, and watched all the color drain away from Heinrick’s skin. He looked almost gray by the time I sat back down. I’d had to stand to reach the ends of the table, to lay out the photos.

  “This woman was killed three days ago.” I got another file out of the stack. I opened it, and fanned the photos on top of it, but didn’t put them with the stack. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I’d be able to match the photos back to the right crime. They were supposed to be marked on the back, but I hadn’t marked them personally, so I didn’t want to risk it. Once you get into court the lawyers get damned picky about evidence and stuff.

  I pointed to the file pictures. “This woman was killed two days ago.”

  Zerbrowski stepped forward and handed me a plastic baggie with a handful of polaroids in it. I tossed the baggie across the table so that it slid by him, and he caught it automatically before it hit the floor. His eyes were very big when he saw the top print.

  “Those women died last night. We think there were two victims, but truthfully we haven’t finished putting together the pieces, so we’re not a hundred percent certain. It could be more, or it could be just one woman, but that’s an awful lot of blood for only one woman, don’t you think?”